It is crazy how three painful and frustrating years can be refuted by a single race weekend. Honda's failures had been filling the headlines since the first pre-season day of 2015, creating a stigma on the Japanese manufacturer's mindset and ethic. Following a "typical" outcome in Australia, no one was expecting Honda to resurge under the floodlights at Sakhir.

Pierre Gasly worked a miracle by grabbing a spot on the third row, as he got promoted to P5 owing to Hamilton's penalty. The race pace simulation had been displaying a number of good signals on Friday and on Sunday it was no exception. The Frenchman took full advantage of Red Bull's double debacle and jumped to P4, holding off Kevin Magnussen on the Haas.

Such a result caused mayhem amongst the fanbase and the paddock. Many rushed to the conclusion that McLaren had got it wrong once again, praising Honda's payback and Gasly's spunky team radio. Generalisation spread over the Bahrain GP, in which it appeared that a single impressive performance could permanently flip an opinion and determine the epilogue of the following 19 races. McLaren's surprise Q2 elimination fostered the regret claims for the British team, which had everyone wondering how they would be feeling seeing themselves in the 7th row, actually 4 rows behind their former engine supplier.

Still, McLaren has used 1 power unit thus far, whereas Toro Rosso-Honda has already been endowed with the 2nd allowed set of components. Furthermore, Toro Rosso's overnight success could reek of a fluke since qualifying, as night races and the Bahrain track possess a large number of variables and nailing them at once has never been a chore for top teams either.

It is no secret that McLaren's main weakness lies in qualifying: the MCL33 has a hard time putting one flying lap together without slacking or struggling. The team justify the see-sawing behaviour of the car, as it is still going through a transition between the evolution of the 2017 car and the introduction of the full 2018 package, which is debuting later this season in Barcelona. Moreover, the team confirmed they had set-up problems as well as a major lack of grip, which was not smoothed by the temperature drop at all.

A week later, the Chinese GP brought everything back to normality. Toro Rosso-Honda fell towards the bottom while McLaren managed a difficult weekend but yielded a point-paying result. The outcome of the Shanghai leg clearly corroborated the "fluke" label to the glorious nights Toro Rosso had in Bahrain, as their performance level was aligned with Australia's. This re-opened the debate on McLaren-Honda, questioning the previous week's chatter.

Not to mention that a lot goes into a divorce as McLaren and Honda's. You always have to look at the bigger picture, which is why Woking's managers have been racking their brains for almost 8 months in 2017 before coming to the conclusion we all know. Carrying on a challenge is always harder than having evidence of a performance leap with an experienced manufacturer - although not as reliable as the top teams. The financial aspect was also putting a tremendous amount of pressure on McLaren's shoulders, as a result of a mass drain of sponsors. With time and money running out, the British team embraced the switch to Enstone, admitting it had not clicked between them and Honda. Sinergy is the least suitable word to describe their partnership, as both were totally unavailable to agree to a compromise and come together as one, starting with both parties refusing to speak up about their own mistakes. A two-way attitude problem plagued the existence of this unfortunate deal: McLaren was hostile and still behaving as a top team when it had become a midfielder, Honda was recalcitrant and disoriented.

McLaren also used the exclusive partnership in their own favour. In other words, Honda was not supplying anyone else, therefore there was no benchmark to compare their performance with. Hence, the competitive chassis- disastrous power unit debate got easily grounded and believable, setting the Woking aero team as the good guy (a very sly image-building move) and Honda as the one and only villain of the story. Clearly the chassis has been working better than the Honda power units throughout the past 3 years but the gap between the loss on the chassis and on the power unit are less dramatic than they have been depicted. As we can see in 2018, McLaren's chassis is flawed compared to Red Bull's on equal engine machinery, which suggests that McLaren is not as comfortable as it claimed to be.

However, the British team is not lacking the know-how, Renault neither and the results are currently in their favour. Honda has started off with a different approach, which still has them as beginners but finding new motivation and projects is always less mind-cluttering, which is why this time it may work out and turn flukes into their normal level on the long term.